Film Fest Returns, At Peace With Itself

Movies

November 19, 2004|By Roger Moore, Sentinel Movie Critic

You want to make a statement about peace in a troubling age. So you start a film festival.

You pick a city where your primary backer has property, a city known around the world as a vacation destination. You find a convenient date, team up with a theme-park movie theater, line up films, guest speakers, all in a mad dash to make that first event happen.

Later, you figure out where you went wrong.

It was a steep learning curve for the organizers of the Global Peace Film Festival.

"I didn't know the community, and if I had, we would've done things differently," says festival director Nina Streich, who divides her year between this Orlando event and the Newport International Film Festival in Rhode Island.

"We did pretty well last year, and we had thought to take a year to regroup and rethink what we were doing since the funding wasn't going to be the same," says festival publicist and consultant Gary Springer. "But Nina really wanted to establish the festival's presence and keep our momentum."

"We were still able to draw people to the banner events of the festival," Streich says. "Last year, we had the money, the opportunity. We had the space, so we introduced people to the festival that way."

The second Global Peace Film Festival is a scaled-down affair. Last year's inaugural event packed 57 films into the Loews Universal Cineplex. Despite the theme-park location and the fact that the festival was new, 1,500 movie tickets were sold.

The second edition of the festival will have 18 feature films, documentaries and short films and will take place in the much smaller Downtown Media Arts Center in Orlando.

"If I had it to do over, I think we would have started it this way, smaller, and then built it," Streich says. "We're delighted to be downtown. We've gotten support from the Downtown Development Board. And the DMAC is the perfect place to show our films."

Other sponsors have joined businessman Shaikh Abdul Taw'ala Ibn Ali Alishtari (A.T., to his friends), who funded the initial event. Although its budget this year -- less than $100,000 -- is a "fraction" of last year's, the festival will still have its signature events, movies and panel discussions about peace. Like last year, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate is the featured guest for the opening. Betty Williams, a Nobel-honored Northern Ireland peace activist will appear at a panel discussion today at 5:30 p.m.

The movies include the 1981 refugee classic The Boat is Full, about Europeans trying to escape the Holocaust by fleeing to none-too-welcoming Switzerland, and the Clay Bird, set in Bangladesh in the grim months before that country's 1970 civil war and separation from Pakistan. The documentaries this year include the Southeastern premiere of Brotherhood (about New York firefighters); Liberia: An Uncivil War; and Another Side of Peace, a movie about Israeli and Palestinian families coming together.

Streich says that even though this year's event will be smaller -- "even if we sell out every show at the DMAC, we could only draw 1,200 people" -- she is more convinced than ever that the time is right and Orlando is the right place for the festival.

"We have something to offer people here that they don't normally see," Streich says. "The more we learn about the city, the more people -- peace groups -- we meet that we know are ready for a festival like this."